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As I see it
satire is not a form of comedy. It is a weapon. One that requires accuracy
and conviction. It involves allying yourself with another person's point
of view, understanding that point of view, twisting it, and spreading
it more effectively than them, like a cancer, until people have no choice
but to listen, and understand, and act. It is the conceptual equivalent
of a vaccine. Satire is about causing pain and abrasion until people fight
back. It's about pulling somebody down into the water and staying down
until the other person drowns. It's not about the moment when the audience
laughs at the joke. It's about the moment when the laugh stops in their
throat because the comedian has gone too far for their tastes. It is not
a smile, it is a look of hurt.
It's a dying art. Somewhere along the way somebody decided to inject humour,
which is unfortunate as humour is the least effective way of making people
stand up and do something. It's soporific. People do not take humour seriously.
In an ideal world, people would be able to draw a distinction between
'funny' and 'not serious', but in our world people can't.
Is there a point to satire? Is there any reason why somebody's viewpoint
should be attacked with satire, and not simply a conventional counter-argument?
Why cloak vitriol and reason in doublespeak? After all, political and
military and cultural leaders do not rally their followers with satire.
Polar Bears do not attempt to catch fish by pretending to be fish, no
athlete ever tried to jump over hurdles by pretending to be a hurdle,
and the Israeli government has never tried to obliterate Palestine by
conducting a clandestine campaign of terror attacks.
Yes, I know. I'm undermining my own argument for the sake of a cheap joke.
I do it again later on by mentioning the television listings page of the
Daily Mirror. Why not? It's my argument, not yours. You'll read that bit about Israel and you'll probably think 'heh', but it won't make you want to go out and burn down the Israeli embassy. Whereas if this page had been a 900-word rant about how Palestinians deserve to be obliterated, you'd get annoyed. You'd probably only send me a nasty e-mail, but at least you'd be doing something
So what's the point? Art, I suppose. Good satire is more interesting than
dry argument. It's exciting in the same way that people in the street
fighting with each other is exciting, and that's a good enough reason
for me.
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"Polar
Bears
do not attempt to catch fish by pretending to be
silly fish"
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As 'Some of
the corpses are amusing' rightly points out, the average John Bird / John
Fortune routine about the mismanagement of a government project may well
be a masterpiece of research and role-play, but it doesn't shock or annoy.
It makes you chuckle, and illustrates that well-paid businessmen are often
clinging to their jobs by their fingernails, but it doesn't make you angry.
So, by my definition, it's not satire. It's good political comedy. The
two things are not the same.
What qualifies as satire, then? The Daily Mail. That's one thing. In a
hundred years, no book of comedy or satire or culture will mention the
Daily Mail. Or the Chick Tract (look it up - you're on the internet, for
heaven's sake). It'll mention Ben Elton and Rory Bremner and Chris Morris
but they aren't satire, or at least they aren't successful satire, as
they haven't achieved anything other than several million laughs and,
in the former case, some terrible books and an Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical.
The Daily Mail is satire. It makes people angry. Mark Thomas doing a routine
about foxhunting might be funny, and it might make you want to agree and
hug the person sitting next to you, but it doesn't make you despise foxhunters,
it doesn't make you want to go outside, right now, and strangle one, and
then strangle his family in an orgy of blind hate. Not like the Daily
Mail, anyway. Mark Thomas does comedy for fifty minutes and then you go
home. The Daily Mail is a complex, multi-layered mental assault.
The articles about foxhunting merge with the anodyne cartoons, with the
'letters to the editor' that are either stupid, or about the inherent
superiority of imperial measurements to metric measurements, or both.
The competitions to win dull holidays to Spain merge with the articles
about how the internet should be banned, which merge with the adverts
for escort agencies which merge with the photographs of smiling old white
people enjoying their large green garden, and you could enjoy it too,
and it annoys you because there's a part of yourself that wants to be
that way. And the television listings section is poorly-designed when
compared with the one in the Daily Mirror.
In order to work, satire has to scare you. It has to make you think that
the viewpoints being satirised are not only popular, they are inevitable
without action to the contrary. In order to work, satire has to be taken
seriously. And the satirist has to be so accurate, so convincing, as to
be indistinguishable from the thing being satirised. The satirist has
to be prepared to be hated.
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Mail
is a complex, multi-layered mental assault"
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